Popular reviews

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  Review by Vee ★★★★★

  imagine: you go to paris on vacation with your friend and the first two men you meet are paul newman & sidney poitier AND they're in a jazz band. talk about unrealistic standards for men!!!

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  Review by sarah ★★★ 2

  Still have my same problems with this one. On the surface it feels so modern and invigorating, but it presents itself so lifelessly. No spirit. Nothing. And I feel even more frustrated after learning that the original book was mainly about Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll’s characters, while the movie added the white character played by Paul Newman. (And, according to Wikipedia, the film was supposed to include interracial romances, but the studio refused, so what's left is Paul Newman making an "all these white girls look alike" remark and then being set up with Joanne Woodward lol.) I love the Newmans in other films, but they’re just so boring here in comparison to Poitier and Carroll’s intrinsic charm and chemistry. Paris Blues is fine, not a bad film, just so middle-of-the-road in almost every aspect.

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  Review by gina 💕 ★★★★★ 3

  i would like to thank all the directors of paul newman's movies that they always have him shirtless at least 3 times in their films

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  Review by eely ★★★★ 2

  “I’m no martyr. I want you.”

  paul newman & joanne woodward & sidney poitier & diahann carroll do french new wave with a little hollywood gloss and it’s just as jazzy and heartbreaking as you’d think it would be.

  paul and jo had so much chemistry every time they looked at each other I felt like I was going to explode.

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  Review by phoebe 💫 ★★★★ 1

  HOT PEOPLE!! and they fucking fall in love, would you believe that

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  Review by Katrina B 😸 ★★★★ 1

  Paul Newman’s character in this and Ryan Gosling’s character in La La Land should hang out and bond over how they saved jazz.

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  Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★½

  Cinematic Time Capsule
  1961 Marathon - Film #57

  Honey, I live music.
  Morning, noon, & the whole night.
  Everything else is just icing on the cake.

  Jazzy Paris cool with one of the hippest soundtracks of the year.

  Poitier and Newman both had much bigger and better films in ’61, but it’s fun watching ‘em bounce off of each other... Plus, Woodward’s final speech hit me much harder than I was expecting.

  BONUS POINTS for Louis Armstrong who literally marches in and steals the entire show.

  You’re a nut.
  Well… I ain’t getting involved with no nut.

  
  Cinematic Time Capsule - 1961 Ranked

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  Review by James 🇺🇦 ★★★½

  Another victim of studio interference, Martin Ritt's Paris Blues had the potential to be a much more progressive and challenging film, but sadly relapsed into safer territory, notably in the shift in focus from a black to white protagonist and the first draft focusing on interracial relationships, something that United Artists backed away from and which, in star Sidney Poitier's own words 'took the spark out of it'.

  Despite reneging on these initial selling points, that doesn't stop it from being a charming romance and laid back 'hang out' type movie in the vein of Richard Linklater's 'Before trilogy', not to mention a terrific jazz movie, one that perhaps doesn't represent the reality or technical details of the genre particularly…

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  Review by nora ★★★½ 2

  i love sidney poitier in romantic roles & it's such a shame he didn't get to do more of them because he's so charming in this movie! also i've been consuming a lot of turn-of-the-sixties americans-in-paris content recently between this and GOODBYE AGAIN and STORY OF A THREE DAY PASS and the james baldwin novels ANOTHER COUNTRY and GIOVANNI'S ROOM, and it's quickly becoming one of my favorite niche genres because of how these stories deal with the feeling of leaving the social/personal turmoil back in the u.s. and how superficial that feeling is. i kind of wish this movie dealt more with that feeling, but i guess they had to make more time for all the jazz sequences, which is honestly fine because, like, music by duke ellington.

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  Review by ncgraham ★★★★ 3

  RIP Diahann Carroll.

  in this movie she immediately registers that Paul Newman is a fuckboy and spurns his advances, which imo makes her braver than any US Marine.

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  Review by paloma ★★★★ 1

  wish hollywood wasn't so scared and had given us the paul newman/diahann carrol love affair we deserved

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  Review by Jordan Horowitz ★★★★★ 2

  If I could give this 10 stars I would. I think it’s my favorite movie of all time. Martin Ritt, where have you been all my life.